Oculus VR announced that pre-orders for the Oculus Rift will go live on January 6 at 8am Pacific. They stated they will be revealing "everything you need to know to order your Rift on Wednesday,". Each pre-order also comes bundled with Lucky's Tale by Playful and EVE: Valkyrie by CCP with every pre-order free of charge.
Still no word on the official release date for the Oculus Rift or when pre-orders can be expected to start shipping out. So far the plan still seems to be "early" 2016, which will probably end up being after the April release of the HTC Vive, and around the same time as PlayStation VR. Also happening on Wednesday will be a Reddit AMA at 6pm Pacific with Oculus founder Palmer Luckey. Hopefully we'll be able to get a clearer idea of a release date and other exciting news.
Oculus VR has also announced that they will be pushing back the release of the Oculus Touch to the second half of 2016, because they've decided that they need more time before release. Oculus states that they are implementing changes to the Touch Controller based on, "significant advances in ergonomics" they've made, and are making the Touch even more, "comfortable, reliable, and natural." They also say the are making larger numbers of pre-production runs so that they can get more Touch hardware into developers hands. Also teased was that, "There will be a huge amount of ground-breaking new content launching alongside Touch."
Quick Take
This year is definitely shaping up to be the year of VR. Hopefully the competition of the Vive, Oculus, and PlayStation VR will mean that gamers will have tons of choices and options about what they can do and what games they can play no matter the device they end up getting. Only time will tell if big studios will start to develop big titles for VR; I for one hope they do, because i'm excited to see what developers can do with VR technology.
